The collection, which took Diaz about 16 years to complete, features the same characters as in Diaz’s first book of stories, “Drown” — the brothers Yunior and Rafa who, like Diaz himself, are born in the Dominican Republic and who immigrate to New Jersey at a young age. The stories explore themes of love, loss and heartbreak.

In the conversation, Diaz also talked about “The Hobbit,” remembering Oscar Wao, and his next book, a novel called “Monstro.”

Read an edited transcript of more of the interview (not featured in the video) below.

As the writer who created Yunior, is it annoying when people think all this is from your own life? Or is it a compliment because you’ve done it so well?

I don’t know if you do it so well. I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections. Even if I was a Martian writing a book about these characters, and I say well, even a Martian crash-landed in New Jersey or the Dominican Republic, I think it’s just a standard impulse. I’m neither flattered nor do I get annoyed by people saying, “this is you,” because I know that what happens with reading is, when we read a book, and it moves us, we feel it in our bodies. That’s real. We want that real experience to have an analog in the real world, i.e. we really want it to have happened to the person who wrote it.

Oscar Wao, the subject of your novel, is such an endearing character. Do you miss him?

I won’t lie, he’s someone who I spent over a decade with. They’re not going, Lola’s not going. They’re not leaving me. The strange part of being a writer is that you haunt your characters, you spend so much time with them. But in the end, they’re the ones who end up haunting you for the rest of your life. A lot of times I will laugh when I see something happening, I say, “Oscar would laugh at that.”

Let’s talk about your epigraphs. You use Sandra Cisneros here, while in “Oscar Wao” you used the Fantastic Four and Derek Walcott, and in “Drown,” Gustavo Perez Firmat. How do you choose them?

I should be like oh, they choose me! Yeah. No, what ends up happening, you spend as much time as me writing a book, in the end, you’re going to find something. In the 16 years, I found this poem. This Cisneros poem, I basically carried it around in my wallet for all the years I wrote it, knowing that that would be the final piece I would put in the book. In many ways, it guides me and keeps me warm when it’s like a hard, long, cold process, knowing that one day I would be able to say, “done.”

Do you have an epigraph already for “Monstro,” your next novel?

I do. I’ve been working on “Monstro” on and off for a long time. Only recently did it start having a name and a picture. There’s two. There’s one by Mario Bellatin and there’s another one from Clarice Lispector.

Your work has touched on island voodoo, the fuku. But “Monstro” is straight apocalyptic, set on Hispaniola.

I don’t think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse. The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it’s the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it’s the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it’s the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones. In many ways, I’m taking both my apocalyptic preoccupation with growing up in the 80s, during this time of possible atomic war, and my apocalyptic saturation of being a young person in a place like the Caribbean. I kind of love monster, alien invasion stories and I’m trying to find if there’s a home for all these things in this new book.

Do you think it’s a good idea to stretch “The Hobbit,” the single book by J.R.R. Tolkien, into a movie trilogy?

Is it a good idea? I don’t—me, I just think it’s kind of a nonsense money grab, and yet I will be the person out in line to watch all three of these movies. Whatever, man, you know how these studios are. They’re like corporations. They’re not humans.

You sold the film rights to “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” What’s the status of that?

Well, I sold them for very little and they quickly, a few years later, expired. I don’t think during this economic collapse there’s much clamor to film a movie about Dominican nerds in New Jersey.